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Just like Hegel, Habermas is convinced that the substance of morality and
ethical life has a religious origin. For Westerners, being moral is inseparable
from understanding themselves in the vocabulary bequeathed by the biblical tradition. But, again like Hegel, Habermas also believes that if it is true
that religion provides the substance of normativity, the discourse of religion,
considered in itself, lacks the conditions for its appropriation. In Hegelian
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vocabulary, one can say that the sphere of religion is not where substance gets
understood also as subject.
For Habermas, the sphere in which subjectivity gets realized
is, in part, philosophy (what Habermas refers to in the above passage by the
transformation through philosophy), and, in part, common sense (what he
calls socialization). I shall return in the end to this mutual and dialectical
relation that Habermas establishes between socialization and philosophy to
account for the possibility of being moral in the modern age, when the traditional religious worldviews have exhausted themselves.2 Habermas claims
that unless religious substance can be subjectively appropriated, unless it
canso to speakmake sense for concrete individuals who need to be able
to take a yes-or-no stand with respect to this substantive content, and who
therefore need to understand religion as raising a truth claim, there is a real
risk that the moral insights contained in the biblical tradition will fall on
deaf ears, and thus eventually disappear altogether, as a dead language that
no one knows how to speak anymore. It is the task of philosophy (Athens)
to appropriate religious substance (Jerusalem) by translating it into criticizable truth claims.3 As Habermas says in the Theory of Communicative Action:
the aura of rapture and terror that emanates from the sacred, the spellbinding power of the holy [die bannende Kraft des Heiligen] is sublimated into the
binding/bonding force of criticizable validity claims [bindenden Kraft kritisierbarer Geltungsansprche] and at the same time turned into an everyday
occurrence (1984, 119). This transition is what Habermas refers to as the
linguistification of the sacred, the profanation, in everyday communication
accessible to all, of religious mysteries originally accessible to the initiated
few. It is the process of rationalization of sacred taboos into moral claims that
Hegel and Freud outlined.
Habermas parts ways with Hegel insofar as for him philosophy can no longer be understood in terms of the absolute unfolding of the
principle of subjectivity. As is well known, Habermas believes that philosophy
after Hegel has undergone a linguistic and pragmatic turn,4 so that what
is true for the absolute subject in Hegels logic becomes, in transcendental
The account of this exhaustion of premodern understandings of religion is given by Habermas in
chapter 5 of Habermas (1984).
Habermass understanding of how Hegel thinks about the process of translating religious content
into philosophical form, thereby understanding substance as subject, follows closely the interpretation
given in Lwith (1962).
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pragmatics, what could turn out to be true for an indefinite future community of interpreters. The principle of subjectivity has passed over into a
principle of intersubjectivity. For the fate of religious substance, this shift
from subjectivity to intersubjectivity has crucial consequences: the translation of religious content into philosophical argument needs to be achieved
under conditions of what Habermas calls methodological atheism (2002,
76). What this means is, at first, quite unproblematic: since according to transcendental pragmatics something is universally valid if and only if it could
becomecounterfactuallythat about which an indefinite community of
speakers could come to enjoy an understanding (Verstndigung), it follows
that the translation of religious content must be such that it is potentially
understandable by all possible perspectives, that is, it must be a translation
which does not exclude nonbelievers. If religious semantic content is to be
appropriated linguistically (communicated intersubjectively), then it must
receive an atheistic translation, since otherwise it could not be shared by
people who lack faith in the event of divine revelation.
Habermass criterion for the philosophical appropriation of
religious content raises several problems, which he has recently addressed in
Habermas (2005) and which have given rise to an interesting debate between
him and Cristina Lafont (Lafont 2007). One problem not mentioned in this
exchange is rather obvious: the possibility that the philosophical translation
of the religious Ur-text may be so successful, may be so atheistic, that it could
wipe away the original text itself.5 For instance, today it is in vogue to translate moral and political concepts into the language of evolutionary biology.
It is perfectly possible to explain what we take to be the rituals and codes of
love into evolutionary terms, as evolutionary psychologists and cognitive scientists do all the time. But the result of this work of translation, of course, is
not that Christians and Darwinians now can come to a mutual understanding as to what love means, but, on the contrary, that the substance of love
(Christian, romantic, etc.) has vanished in the process of translation. Some,
including Habermas, may argue that such extreme translation may also get
rid of subjectivity,6 but in any case what seems quite certain is that substance
itself will get lost in translation.
We would have here a reversal of Benjamins dictum: My thinking is related to theology as a
blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of
what is written would remain (1999, 471). This problem of giving a rational interpretation of the Bible
is of central importance in other attempted solutions of the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem,
such as the ones offered by Leo Strauss and Karl Jaspers, which I have no space to discuss here.
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On the distinction between ethical and moral in Habermass communicative ethics, see Habermas
(1993).
This crucial idea of a symbol is derived from Jasperss postwar works on the relation between faith
and philosophy, such as the 1947 Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (Jaspers 1994).
It is well known that Habermas first develops his communicative conception of power in relation to
Arendts notion of action as disclosure to others in speech acts; but it is less well known that Arendt
herself was following Jasperss own idea of communicative reason, which Jaspers develops precisely in
relation to the problem of faith and philosophy after the war, although its original form was already
given in Vernunft und Existenz of 1935. Habermas has written an essay on Jasperss theory of the
symbol (Habermas 2001, chap. 2), but the extent of the real influence exerted by Jasperss treatment of
Athens and Jerusalem on Habermas, to my mind, remains to be explored.
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The reference to the critical political theology of Metz is found in early Habermas as well:
the repoliticization of the biblical inheritance observable in contemporary theological discussion
(Pannenberg, Moltmann, Solle, Metz)does not mean atheism in the sense of a liquidation without
trace of the idea of God. The idea of God is transformed [aufgehoben] into the concept of a Logos
that determines the community of believers and the real life-context of a self-emancipating society.
God becomes the name for a communicative structure that forces men, on pain of a loss of their
humanity, to go beyond the accidental, empirical nature to encounter one another indirectly, that
is, across an objective something that they themselves are not (1975, 121). For discussion of Habermass relation to this critical political theology, see Arens, John, and Rottlnder (1991); Arens (1997);
and Fiorenza (1992).
10
11
For this reason it would be much too quick to oppose, in a premature fashion, Habermass theological discourse to those developed in Derrida (2000) and Agamben (1999), for whom the motif of the
rest or remainder is explicit and essential.
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a people that stood apart from other nations (the rest of Israel, understood
in all of the many senses of this expression). In the Western philosophical
tradition, in fact, there is no more perfect exemplar of religious substance
and of ethical life than the Jewish people: this is clearly acknowledged by all
those modern philosophical critics of Judaism, be it Spinoza or Hegel, Marx
or Nietzsche. Thus, it is clear that if Habermas cannot provide a conception
of translation of religious substance (that is, of Judaism) into philosophical
language that fares better than Hegels attempt (which ends up eliminating
the voice of Judaism in the unity of reason),12 then it is the entire project
of a communicative ethics that would fail to live up to Adornos motto:
remember, repeat, work through (erinnern, wiederholen, durcharbeiten).13
This is not to say that Habermas shares Adornos beliefs with respect to the
fate of reason after the Shoah, but it does mean that Habermas cannot afford
to minimize the implications of Adornos motto in his own attempt at reestablishing the public role of philosophy in postwar Germany.
In my opinion, the above point offers the best explanation
for why Habermas feels so close to Jean Baptiste Metzs critical political
theology, which turns on the idea of an anamnestic reason.14 The concept of
anamnestic reason is precisely the idea of a rationality that remembers, that
is, brings back into Christian theology, the memory of the Shoah and counterbalances what Metz believes to be the original sin of Christian theology,
namely, its having chosen the language of Greek metaphysics rather than
that of biblical prophecy in order to spread the glad tidings, the gospel of
Christs death and resurrection to eternal life.15 Thus, it is absolutely essential
for Habermas that the theology that translates the religious substance into the
public sphere (hence political theology in the sense of Metz is synonymous
with public theology) must be a theology that brings into the consciousness
of the public the memory of the Shoah, that offers, in other words, a sort of
restitution of the exterminated rest of humanity.
The concept of anamnestic reason has a prevailing meaning in postwar Germany: it means that whatever conception of public reason
12
On Hegels translation of Judaism into philosophical reason, see Fackenheim (1973) and Yovel (1998).
13
See the essay Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong? Johannes Baptist Metz on
Unity amidst Multicultural Plurality, in Habermas (2002), 12938.
14
On Metzs political theology, see Metz (2002). I have no space here to engage the great problem of
the Hellenization of both Christianity and Judaism, perhaps the central theme of Hermann Cohens
Jdische Schriften. Suffice to say that all political theology in the twentieth century situates itself at
this crossroads of the encounter between Athens and Jerusalem.
15
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one has, the idea of public reason must be such that the memory of the Shoah
becomes what is first and foremost for philosophy as such. Postmetaphysical, post-Hegelian reason can no longer pretend that the Jewish faith can be
aufgehoben by German philosophical Geist.16 That is why it cannot ever be
a conception of public reason for which the biblical faith could simply vanish. This may explain why the later Habermas has been unwilling to adopt
the standpoint of a pure universalism, that is, the standpoint according to
which, if a particular religious faith cannot be translated into terms that are
universally acceptable (and this is obviously the case of the Jewish faith in
Israel being the chosen people), then this should be understood as a loss for
that particular faith. As he says, the postmetaphysical philosopher is someone who has the experience that intuitions which had long been articulated
in religious language can neither be rejected nor simply retrieved rationally (2002, 79). As long as religious language bears with itself inspiring,
indeed, unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude (for the moment?)
the expressive power of a philosophical language and still await translation
into a discourse that gives reasons for its positions, philosophy, even in its
postmetaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor to repress religion
(ibid., quoting Habermas 1992a, 60).
And yet, at the same time, Habermas is aware of the double
bind that this position creates for him: unless some process of translation is
undertaken, the religious substance also risks being lost forever to the waves
of scientistic (naturalizing and reductionist) discourse, and thus here
too, from the side of positivism, the memory of Judaism and of its attempted
annihilation could vanish from the earth.17 The problem is that, as discussed above, the process of translation entails that one no longer has to be a
believer in order to share in the meaning of the religious substance. The task
for Habermas, as it were, is how to allow Jewish thought to survive, how to
communicate universally what the meaning of Judaism is (namely, universal
peace and justice represented in history by a people that separates itself from
all others),18 within a universalistic renewal of the project of Enlightenment.
The early Habermas may have believed that this aufhebung was still possible, as can be seen from
his essay The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers, in Habermas (2002), 3759. This essay,
already in its very title, betrays the idea of a German philosophical aufhebung of Judaism.
16
On Habermass recent critique of scientism see Habermas (2003), the arguments of which rely
extensively on conceptions of human nature found in Jonas and Arendt, which could themselves
also be understood as philosophical translations of intuitions found in Judaism.
17
This general definition is drawn from Cohen (1924), generally recognized as the source of the
renewal of Jewish thinking in the twentieth century. For another, more recent and realist, perspective on the messianic vocation of Judaism see Hartman (2006).
18
2 51
19
20
For another interpretation of Peukerts importance for Habermas see McCarthy (1993), chap.8.
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On Habermass use of Benjamin to traverse the conflict of Athens and Jerusalem see now Brunkhorst (2010).
21
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Habermas here rests his hope of redemption (in Benjaminian terms: the
weak messianic force of the better argument) on the facticity of processes of
socialization that can establish by themselves the solidarity of communication. As I showed with the first quotation above, socialization plays a crucial
role for the success of translating religious substance into profane communication. Habermas, therefore, argues that there are good reasons to be moral,
but these reasons find their strength at the level of bad conscience and
not at the level of motivating good actions, since here good reasons turn out
to be weaker than other means to get people to do the right thing. Thus,
ultimately, for Habermas one knows that one is rational because one feels
guilty whenever one does something that one is not supposed to do, in accordance with the norms into which one has been socialized. But Habermass
acceptance of guilt as index sui of truth is as good an indication as any that
communicative reason may, in the end, remain caught within the sphere of
religion, thus endangering the entire premise of a translation of religion
into philosophy. Communicative reason, at least, is no gay science.
At this point it is useful to introduce Spinoza, who advocates,
before Nietzsche, both the need to separate reason from the experience of
guilt and the need to separate philosophy from faith.23 From Spinozas standpoint, in fact, it appears that Habermass methodological atheism, despite
its best intentions, may not effect a real separation of philosophy from faith,
but instead collapses philosophy on the side of faith. For the Spinoza of the
Theological-Political Treatise, the philosophically correct conception of God
is one that understands God as eternal nature (universal laws of nature),
rather than as an omnipotent legislator and judge, as the commanding and
loving God of the Bible (TTP, chap. 4). Nature commands nothing, and for
that reason one cannot be in the wrong with respect to God as nature, and
thus one cannot have guilty feelings: philosophy understood as the knowledge of nature or God is a joyous science because it cannot possibly lead to
sad affects such as bad conscience and guilt.
For the Theological-Political Treatise (henceforward TTP) I have used Spinoza (2007). For general
overviews of the question of Spinozas atheism and the problem of the conflict between reason and
faith, see Israel (2002), Israel (2009), and Nadler (2004). On Spinozas critique of guilt in ethics, see
Deleuze (2001).
23
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24
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Thus one can see that Habermass post-Hegelian problematic of translating religion into a democratically structured public sphere is prefigured by
Spinoza. The difference between them is that Spinoza, unlike Habermas,
argues that this translation falls not within philosophy but within faith (TTP,
chaps. 14 and 15). From Spinozas radically atheistic perspective, Habermass
methodological atheism appears to be a variant of what Jaspers calls a philosophical faith, that is, a translation into universally acceptable reasons of the
main tenets of religious faith which constitute the basis of morality.
But if this is the case, then another aporia appears to confront
Habermass methodological atheism. For, given Spinozas atheistic perspective, the distinction between reason and faith is precisely what requires that
morality be based on religious faith (and this for political reasons: morality
is only possible in theologico-political terms). The methodological atheism
of Habermasbelieved to arise out of exclusively philosophical considerationswould in the end stumble on its own moral precommitment: one
cannot be both atheistic and moral, one can only be atheistic and philosophical. From Spinozas standpoint, philosophy and a morality based on
the experience of guilt are ultimately opposed and irreconcilable, insofar as
there exists no necessity imputable to any self-chosen forms of the human
life-world when these are considered in relation to nature itself (TTP, chap.
4). From the standpoint of God as nature, it is entirely an accident, a radical contingency that human beings exist who believe in moral goodness.
Spinozas methodological atheism shows that the translation of religious substance into philosophical concepts is not just an experiment that may put
religion at risk: rather, it reveals the radical status of experiment (Versuch)
that morality has. Communicative reason and discourse ethics do not offer
a transcendental standpoint from which to judge the result of the experiment
of translating religion into philosophy: they are themselves in question along
with this experiment.
References
Accetti, Carlo Invernizzi. 2010. Can Democracy Emancipate Itself from
Political Theology? Habermas and Lefort on the Permanence of the
Theologico-Political. Constellations 17 (2): 25470.
Adorno, Theodor W. 2003a. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II: Eingriffe,
Stichworte, Anhang. Edited by R. Tiedemann. Vol. 10.2 of Gesammelte
Schriften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
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